Stray Dogs

Directed by: Tsai Ming Liang

2013 | Taiwan / France | 2hr 14min

A father and his two children wander the margins of modern day Taipei. By day the father scrapes out a meager income as a human billboard, while his young son and daughter roam the supermarkets and malls surviving off free food samples. Each night the family takes shelter in an abandoned building. The father is strangely affected by a hypnotic mural adorning the wall of this makeshift home. On the day of the father’s birthday the family is joined by a woman—might she be the key to unlocking the buried emotions that linger from the past? “Tsai may well be cinema’s foremost connoisseur of defeat: the best chronicler we have of the temps mort between social reality and darkly comic dreams of despair.” Tony Rayans, Film Comment Magazine.

Grand Jury Special Prize, Venice Film Festival, 2013